


Symmetries

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: F/F, Ficlet, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 16:42:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16768963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: Matters of the heart are never easy.(Two strangers find common ground in their mutual unrequited love for an eldritch space crab.)





	Symmetries

**Author's Note:**

> The Convivial Charlady is the woman who was gathering love stories during the Season of Adorations, and apparently I ship her with the Lady in Lilac now.
> 
> For the record, I’m aware of that bit of canon that says women refer to the Bazaar as male, but I decided to take a few liberties with it.

The Convivial Charlady is sweeping up the dust outside the Bazaar’s paper door when she feels a cool breeze across her face, carrying a trace of bittersweet perfume, and hears the rustle of cloth just behind her shoulder.

She sets her broom aside, and turns with calm deliberation to see a woman there, tall and silk-clad, pale as lacre. The Charlady has seen her at a distance from time to time, moving through crowded streets like smoke: the Lady in Lilac, the one they call a ghost of the Feast of the Rose. 

A peculiar guest, she thinks, in a peculiar place to meet a guest, and stranger still that her appearance should be so surprising; even at her age, the Charlady is hardly deaf, but she’d neither seen nor heard the woman approach. She hadn’t expected to _be_ approached, or spoken to as anything like an equal; most of that high society lot might look at working folk, but they don’t ever really _see_ them. The Lady in Lilac seems to see everything, from the Charlady herself to the merchants scurrying past and the bats that roost and chatter among the spires, and to hold it all in the same regard. And yet, for someone so striking, it’s oddly hard to look at her, and harder still to keep her image in the mind. The Charlady’s gaze wants to slide right on past to the next section of wall, the one where no one is standing – but she’s been surviving in this city for nigh on seventy years, before the Fall and after, and she has practice seeing and remembering what’s really there.

“So, you’re the one who’s been caring for my lady while I was gone,” the Lady says, her voice light and distant with amusement. It’s hard to say what she thinks about that, though what she means is obvious even before she lays a hand against the Bazaar’s rough flank and sketches the outline of something there. A sigil, the Charlady thinks. She knows a few of them from her work. This one is a mark of yearning unconsummated.

“I am,” she says, looking up into violet eyes, not averting her gaze even when it feels like she’s falling upwards into pools of light. She knows how to live here. Another thing she’s learned is how not to drown.

The Lady laughs – a wistful sound, like half-remembered music – and says, “You and I, we’re both only human.”

The Charlady isn’t sure that’s true, but she understands. Ghost or otherwise, the Lady in Lilac is human enough. The Bazaar is something different, older, _more._

She can remember what it was like to stand in those inner chambers, enveloped by heat and darkness, pressing her hands to the walls of that great, slow heart and feeling it beat beneath her fingers. She wonders whether the Lady has ever felt those things herself, or if that’s an intimacy reserved for those much nearer to the ground. She doubts she’ll ever know for sure. But she knows what it’s like to want a love that will never be yours, and what she dares next is done with that knowledge: a step closer, a hand clasped, a moment of encompassing stillness. The Lady’s skin is winter-cold, but if her heart still beats at all, the Charlady is sure that it’s like her own, rapid and fragile.

“I’ve stories aplenty for you to bring her,” she says, “if you’d like to hear them. Most are useless. Some are true. One or two have yet to be written.” And then she laughs, and adds, “Even at my age, yes. I think we all have a few unwritten stories left in us.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” the Lady says. “I hope you are.”

And she bends low, silks shifting as she lifts the Charlady’s hand to her mouth for a kiss; her breath is cool, her perfume sweet and heady as frosted honey, but all of that means little enough in the end. Love is a lonely thing, like all the heart’s secrets, and it’s good to find someone else who understands.

They’re only human, the both of them. Maybe that can almost be enough.


End file.
